EthicalDative

What It Means

Posted on May 15, 2021 by JMN

The so-called ‘ethical dative’ or ‘dative of interest’, where the use of an indirect object pronoun expresses the involvement of the subject in the action of the verb, intensifies such feelings as sadness, happiness and mockery.

Ten cuidado, y no te me cortes un dedo. (F. Monge, in a lecture given at the University of Antwerp. 11 March 1983)
Be careful you don’t cut one of your fingers.
(By using me the speaker indicates that he is involved, that he will be sorry if it happens.)

El marido empezó con unos comentarios imbéciles, y me le reí en la cara. (M. Puig, 1980: 61)
Her husband began with some stupid remarks, and I laughed in his face.

La semana pasada se nos suicidó un parroquiano. (E. Mendoza, 1985:44)
Last week one of our parishioners committed suicide.

¿Y si soy un monstruo? ¿Y si me la violo? (A. Bryce Echenique, 1981: 85)
And if I’m a monster? And if I rape her?

The text cited is from Jacques de Bruyne, “A Comprehensive Spanish Grammar,” Blackwell Publishers, 1995.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary, Quotations | Tagged blogging, grammar, language, personal | Leave a comment

The Rock Pile

Posted on May 14, 2021 by JMN

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

Dwight Garner’s review of a new biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings* evokes a foible-wracked genius:

It’s a pleasure to meet this cursing, hard-drinking, brilliant, self-destructive, car-wrecking, fun-loving, chain-smoking, alligator-hunting, moonshine-making, food-obsessed woman again on the page.

The passage that hits home with me is this one:

She labored over her sentences, writing and rewriting. “No one knows how many composite sentences I have broken up into shorter direct ones, like the convict of hard labor ‘making little ones out of big ones’ on the rock pile.”

Pounding verbiage into gravel and sifting out twelve smooth stones to array in a select saying is the end of this sentence.

The author of “The Yearling” viewed mankind as less promising than rocks:

“Someday, I shall write a great feminist novel,” she wrote when young, “urging women to gird on their armor and kill all the men…”

(Dwight Garner, “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a Novelist Who Went on a Quest for an Authentic Life,” NYTimes, 5-10-21)

*Ann McCutchan, “The Life She Wished to Live.”

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged biography, language, literature, rhetoric, society, style, writing | Leave a comment

Neruda LXXXII

Posted on May 12, 2021 by JMN

[LXXXII]
Amor mío, al cerrar esta puerta nocturna
My love, on closing this nocturnal door
te pido, amor, un viaje por oscuro recinto:
I ask, love, for a voyage through dark environs:
cierra tus sueños, entra con tu cielo en mis ojos,
shut your dreams, come with your sky into my eyes,
extiéndete en mi sangre como en un ancho río.
stretch inside my blood like a wide river.

Adiós, adiós, claridad que fue cayendo
Goodbye, goodbye, clear light gone falling
en el saco de cada día del pasado,
onto every last day’s sack of the past,
adiós a cada rayo de reloj o naranja,
farewell to every ray of clock or orange,
salud oh sombra, intermitente compañera.
greetings, O shadow, sometime companion.

En esta nave, o agua, o muerte, o nueva vida,
On this vessel, either water, death, or life anew,
una vez más unidos, dormidos, resurrectos,
once more united, sleeping, resurrected,
somos el matrimonio de la noche en la sangre.
we are the marriage of the night in blood.

No sé quién vive o muere, quién reposa o despierta,
I don’t know which lives or dies, reposes or wakes,
pero es tu corazón el que reparte
but it’s your heart that distributes
en mi pecho los dones de la aurora.
on my chest the donations of the dawn.

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Cien sonetos de amor
1924, Pablo Neruda y Herederos de Pablo Neruda
1994, Random House Mondadori
Cuarta edición en U.S.A: febrero 2004

[English translation by JMN.]

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, Pablo Neruda, poetry, Spanish-English, translation | Leave a comment

‘A Beautiful, Pathetic Object’

Posted on May 10, 2021 by JMN

It’s a pleasure to meet William T. Wiley, who moved and shook in a West Coast “funk art” scene while steering clear of wealth and fame. It’s no surprise that agreement on what exactly defined the funk art movement was nugatory. For example: “It wasn’t, for starters, redolent of New York in the heyday of Minimalism.”

Based at the University of California, Davis, [Wiley] shared his idiosyncratic wisdom, or “Wiz-dumb,” as he called it… He exhorted his students to remain open to everything, except for theory or ideology.

*Mr. Wiley was enamored of question marks, which appeared in a number of his paintings, like this one, “Modern Art Teacher.” Credit… William T. Wiley.*

Wiley’s Weltanschauung emits a whiff of California cool that’s quaintly boomerish — like praying for peace. This article evokes the vibe in alluding to “a now-vanished scene informed by Mr. Wiley’s communitarian spirit.” It must be said, an artist whose idea of real life was “to go salmon fishing or deal with tree limbs” has found purpose.

Reading the Stains” (1971). Mr. Wiley used words to complement a drawing style that was rooted in the most accessible forms of visual culture: comics, road maps and children’s book illustration. Credit… William T. Wiley/Hosfelt Gallery and Parker Gallery.

This tribute leaves me with a sole sticking point:

Mr. Wiley’s affection for Western lore and the myth of the lone rider was undercut by an opposing fascination with the meditative proclivities of the Far East. He was a devotee of Zen Buddhism, in which he was deeply read, and his friends wondered whether it explained his permanent air of detached mellowness.

I’m far from understanding why devotion to Zen is perceived to “undercut” and oppose affection for cowboy mythology.

(Deborah Solomon, “William T. Wiley, ‘Funk Artist’ Who Spurned Convention, Dies at 83,” NYTimes, 5-5-21 )

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, language, painting, style | Leave a comment

Resistance Is Futile…

Posted on May 9, 2021 by JMN

*Matthew McConaughey. Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times.*

… when it comes to quoting Matthew McConaughey.

“I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond.”

“Knowin’ the truth, seein’ the truth and tellin’ the truth are all different experiences.”

(Quoted by Mimi Swartz, “Could Matthew McConaughey Be All Right, All Right, All Right for Texas?”, NYTimes, 5-9-21)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged humor, humour, language, miscellaneous, rhetoric, style, Texas | Leave a comment

Messing With Space

Posted on May 6, 2021 by JMN

Jules Olitski’s “Mushroom Perfume” (1962) in the show “Jules Olitski: Color to the Core” at Yares Art. Credit… Estate of Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Yares Art.

Like a pig rooting for truffles I harvest luscious phrases from Roberta Smith’s art critiques.

After “he jumped on the Color Field painting bandwagon,” Jules Olitski (1922 – 2007) created works that “mess with space and scale in a visceral, almost sculptural way.”

His paintings have “wall power” and “come at us with cartoonish verve.”

They “tacitly ignore the medium’s physical limits, implying that the image extends far beyond the canvas….”

Fanny D” (1960), the show’s first painting, suggests brightly colored eggs contained by a pink basket, nest or teething ring — that careers across a lavender field. Credit… Estate of Jules Olitski licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Yares Art.

Olitski’s shapes “give us formalism at its most ferocious and most fun.” A critic who compares a shape to a “teething ring” is no slouch at fun. And it takes caliber to call a background “very pushy.”

*Fair Charlotte” (1961), two orbs galvanized by a very pushy background of egg-yolk yellow. Credit… Estate of Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Yares Art.*

Could the fact that “[Olitski’s] paintings have sometimes been called feminine” explain their appeal to my womanish nature? Not wholly; the man in me is on board with them too.

(Roberta Smith, “The Great Beginning of Jules Olitski,” NYTimes, 1-28-21)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, criticism, journalism, Jules Olitski, language, painting, Roberta Smith, style | 4 Comments

‘Gloopy Glory’

Posted on May 5, 2021 by JMN

*Auerbach’s “Portrait of William Feaver” (2007). Credit… Frank Auerbach and Marlborough Fine Art, London and Luhring Augustine.*

The paintings of 90-year-old Frank Auerbach, “last surviving member of a pathfinding generation of postwar British figurative painters,” are up my alley. Auerbach’s iterative pigment attacks are savage and astonishing, and Jason Farago is always good for a blue-streak of commentary.

Viscid, murky… paintings… not the sort you love at first sight… burned oranges and sallow yellows, the dirty browns and olives of a filthy bus window… a narrow band of brown and ocher smears, only a bit differentiated from a background of bilious blue-green…

*“The Awning I,” from 2008, depicts a streetscape in Auerbach’s North London neighborhood. Credit… Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Fine Art, London and Luhring Augustine, New York.*

… Fluid, vigorous lines, full of zigzags and hairpin turns, applied with an almost vulgar density… a hard-to-interpret helix of sickly, mossy yellow-green: a calligraphic whirlwind that, from another painter, would read as a gesture of impertinence.

*“Head of David Landau” (2006), a charcoal drawing of another of Auerbach’s frequent sitters. Credit… Frank Auerbach and Marlborough Fine Art, London and Luhring Augustine.*

Farago’s ear fails him only when he writes “gloopy glory”; the glory is “goopy.”

(Jason Farago, “The Gloopy Glory of Frank Auerbach’s Portraits,” NYTimes, 1-21-21)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, drawings, Frank Auerbach, Jason Farago, journalism, language, painting, rhetoric, style, writing | 2 Comments

How Are Posh Men Educated?

Posted on May 4, 2021 by JMN

‘Eton has long provided potent lessons in elitism and how it works.’ Boris Johnson and David Cameron at a Conservative association dinner in Oxford in 2006. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex/Shutterstock.

…The vanities of posh men… centre on an ancient system that trains a narrow caste of people to run our affairs….

Ever questing to penetrate British lingo, I wobble over “public” versus “private” education in the kingdom’s parlance. In my country, private school is where the wealthy go, and public school is for the rest of us. It’s a system straightforwardly corrupt and named. In contrast, John Harris’s terminology respecting the UK variant seems crucivalent and meanderish to me. Perhaps that’s how the lords wish it.

… This is essentially a story about privilege, and the shamelessness and insensitivities that come with it. More specifically, it centres on the renaissance of an archetype that has been nothing but trouble: the ambitious, dizzyingly confident public schoolboy [my emphasis], convinced of his destiny but devoid of any coherent purpose… Brexit, let us not forget, is a direct result of the latter-day dominance of politics by the privately educated [my emphasis].

(John Harris, “Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground,” theguardian.com, 5-2-21)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged Britain, conservatism, culture, jargon, journalism, language, lexicon, linguistics, miscellaneous, personal, semantics, society | Leave a comment

Travesía (11)

Posted on May 3, 2021 by JMN

*Whitman 1819 – 1892* [Image from www.allenginsberg.org]

*Fulton Ferry Boat (Brooklyn, New York), July 1890 via The Library of Congress, Washington DC.* [Image from www.allenginsberg.org]

Versión castellana del poema “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) de Walt Whitman
English text at http://www.poetryfoundation.org
Spanish Interpretation by JMN

[Translator’s note: The whole of part 7 follows. Of the poem’s 9 parts this short one has its peculiar thorniness. The elfish spin Whitman places on his queries and hedging averments — “as good as” and “for all” — dares my Spanish. “Who knows… but” reeks of subjunctive mood, but I’ve groped with moot outcomes for Spanish-sounding phraseology that puts the tone across. Whether or not my dependent clauses cut the mustard, ¿quién sabe?]
(7)
Closer yet I approach you,
Cada vez más me acerco a vosotros,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
La consideración que ahora tengáis de mí, tanta tuve yo de vosotros — acumulé mis reservas por adelantado,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Pensé larga y seriamente en vosotros antes de que nacierais.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
¿Quién iba a saber lo que hubiera de domiciliarse en mí?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
¿Quién sabe que yo no disfrute esto?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
¿Quién sabe que, pese al extremo de lejanía, yo no os contemple ahora, dado que no me podéis ver a mí?

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-Spanish, language, poetry, translation, Walt Whitman | Leave a comment

The Wrath of Divines

Posted on April 30, 2021 by JMN

[The New Yorker article’s illustrating image and caption:] *“As always, but especially when it comes to describing the numinous, the inadequacy of language is not only a problem for readers, but for writers, too.* Image from Hulton Archive / Getty”

Like cartooning, the act of translation has proven dangerous at times. For his role in putting Christian scriptures into English, John Wycliffe’s long-dead bones were dug up, burnt, and chucked into the river by order of churchmen.

… The act of translation itself entails certain claims about the nature of sacred literature. The vernacular, for instance, was once so scandalous that church authorities dug up John Wycliffe’s bones, four decades after his death, setting fire to his skeleton and dumping what was left of him into the River Swift to punish the memory of the man who wanted to make the Bible available in English.

(Casey Cep, “What We Can and Can’t Learn from a New Translation of the Gospels,” The New Yorker, 4-28-21)

The arc of demented piety is brow-furrowing and bends towards homicide. As an impertinent translator of Pablo Neruda I count it a blessing that he has a non-faith-based following.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged Bible, language, miscellaneous, Pablo Neruda, personal, poetry, religion, society, Spanish-English, spirituality, translation | 2 Comments